Heroin use spiked in 2006, dropped back down in 2008, and has
risen steadily after that to reach record highs in 2012,
according to data from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health
Services Administration. In 2012, an estimated 669,000 people
used heroin.

There are several likely explanations for why heroin has become
more popular and spread to the American suburbs. Interestingly,
the
prescription drug epidemic is partly to blame for the spike
in heroin use.

As painkillers increased in popularity in U.S. suburbs, states
began cracking down on abuse, making the pills more expensive and
less readily available than they once were. This crackdown has
provided an opportunity for
Mexican drug traffickers to push heroin in the
U.S. Heroin provides a similar high to painkillers, and
it's a lot cheaper.

For some suburbanites who start out using prescription drugs,
like one high school student The Christian Science Monitor
interviewed, it's easy to switch to heroin because it's so
much more readily available than painkillers.

The National Institute on Drug Abuse points
out that three recent studies have found nearly half of young
people who inject heroin reported abusing prescription opioids
before starting to use heroin.

Heroin might also be more enticing to first-time users because
these days it can be inhaled or smoked rather than injected with
a needle, which is stigmatized and particularly risky.
Eventually, once users are hooked on heroin, they typically move
to IV use because it's more efficient.

Heroin still isn't as widely used as marijuana, prescription
pills, or cocaine, but it has a higher dependency rate and is
more
likely to cause fatal overdoses than some other drugs.